Steorn's perpetual motion claims are extraordinary. They've raised millions from investors, and 2007 is the year that this will all change the world or Steorn will fall apart. Which will it be? Find out here first.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Today we learn that Shaun Menzies, one of the founders of Steorn, reached the South Pole after 58 days of hiking. To learn more, check out Shaun's blog or visit the team's website, Beyond Endurance.

Creating a new sticky thread entitled "Nearly There..." sure caught a few people's attention today. Sean McCarthy, CEO of Steorn, was kind enough to answer a couple of questions:

overconfident: Sean, Did Shaun take an OC MPMM with him to keep warm? What does it take to get you to participate here?

Steorn: Hi OC - sorry man - life has been hectic, all in a very positive way :-), I was going to say that Shaun was in fact testing bearings in different climates, but to be honest that would just be making a joke of what is a huge achievement on his part, something that he has wanted to do since I have known him - and fair play to him.

I will have more time over the next while so I will try to pop in and chat.

Yep I saw it, seems pretty cool. Go ahead and test the hell out of it, from the chat that I have seen it looks like the guys know what they are doing on that front.

Sean

As WhiteLite points out, and many of you have already noticed, Alsetalokin has been the center of attention the past few days in the forum with his video, posted primarily to shut up Omnibus. Unfortunately for Alsetalokin, he has attracted every other nut out there. With this episode so far we've learned more about the dynamics of the free energy community and the larger geek community more so than the interesting physics that might be occurring within Alsetalokin's WhipMag.

While I fail to see the point of the joke, I can see someone with that level of skill having fun with people who don't understand the details.

People used to put coffee pots on the internet. There is no reason a web cam can't can be put onto some well lit toy and just watch it spin down.

I have a busted led wind up flash light. I bet you could rig something like that up to run for a week or more. The total amount of energy to overcome saphire bearings would be really small, and the kick back would recharge the battery from mechanical motion.

So even with a web cam, something would have to run for a month to be believable. Why turn it off???

"Alsetalokin is f*cking with your minds. Guess not one replication will show same effect. He's laughing his balls off.

Respect!"----Totally - I think it's fantastic. Maryyugo appears to be the only one still taking an appropriately sceptical stance.

I can't believe the wild goose chase he's got everyone on and his increasingly bizzare statements that everyone hangs off. One minute he's saying the right type of plastic base is crucial, the next he's saying his kitchen is radioactive! No doubt the phase of the moon will come into it at some stage and the replicators will all have their lunar cycle calenders out.

He says he won't leave the device running while he's away in case it injures his dog (lol) and his videos are intentionally crappy. He keeps saying "it's definitely not OU" and then showing a device that appears to be just that, but refuses to carry out tests (eg applying a load) that will prove once and for all it isn't. Come on can nobody see it!!!

AS to the Sean South Pole thing - I really would love to talk to Steorn's investors as to how they feel about paying for Sean's fantastically expensive jaunts from their own pockets. After all Steorn has no other income, so some poor sucker has just paid his wages and his amazing holiday.

I'm pretty excited about the Bussard reactor now. I've been trying to compute particle motions and it was never stable. So last night I tried a slight variation, and voila! it was perfectly stable. Fusion power here I come :-)

I'm pretty excited about the Bussard reactor now. I've been trying to compute particle motions and it was never stable. So last night I tried a slight variation, and voila! it was perfectly stable. Fusion power here I come :-)

OC/Al have created a bit of a Frankenstein's monster, I hope they don't suffer too much under the "heat of the the lights".

Meanwhile, a telling comment on PESWiki:"Achieving acceleration from just magnets interacting, as appears to be the case here, is truly remarkable. It certainly isn't ready for market; not close; but it is proof of concept that magnets can provide motive force. That is groundbreaking."

If proof of concept is such a breakthrough, that implies that all other claimed magnet motors don't work (many of which are "about to enter production"), and never have.

It may look like it to you but it snot. In fact, the tachometere shows that the system winds down rather fast and if clanzer didn't keep tweaking it with his hand and with the air blast, it would stop pretty quickly.

"When news of this effect gets out and it is optimized and replicated wouldn't the price of oil collapse overnight?"

I think you may be being sarcastic, but the world uses 30 million barrels of oil per day. That's about 51 TWh. Even if it works, building 2 TW of magnet motors will take a little longer than overnight.

Could somebody please ask Babcat or Drichardson to reactivate my account on FizzX? I just now screwed it up and can't log on anymore. You'll know this is really me when I'm able to log on over there again and say thanks...

AL,This is just too ironically wonderful. Your little science sleight of hand has caused steorn to crash, not to mention the youtube and digg uproar proving peoples tendency to believe the impossible over the "more than likely". I'd say you've proved the point. Point, set and match to AL. Nice.Where is the motor exactly though?

Total confusion in the Steorn forum: people begging, threatening, laughing. Even the spudders (and the banned weirdo's) crawled from under their rock to comment.

Alsetalokin tried to make a point several times last day, which was mostly overlooked: why do people accept from Steorn, what they do not tolerate from him?

He never told untruth, he just didn't answer all the questions, and diverted others. This is exactly the thing Sean always did, before he stopped public communication at all.

He never claimed to have found something conflicting known physics, which Steorn did. He never asked for help, and didn't ask for replication. Unlike Steorn, that even opened an elite developers hangout.

There is a lot of people, me included, that did invest a lot of time in Steorn. I don't mind, it's a good exercise in the English language, and it makes jolly fun following the soap (and it makes a good story to tell when with friends). Other people invested a lot of personal idea's and private emotions and some also a lot of money to visit Dublin and London. For the 'believers' it became a real part of their lives, as for the 'cynical skeptic' like me, it is just entertainment. It is not a nice experience to realise your serious investments were never more than a part of a joke.

Back to the point: why do people not tolerate from Alsetalokin, what they accept from Steorn? Maybe it is about the emotions of lost hope. This could be also a warning to Steorn, about the scorn that will rise when all these people realise they were fooled all the time (and some of them are weird and angry and have a lot of time).

Ping1400

Remember: Steorn is just doing this for the money, which makes them evil. Alsetalokin is just doing this to make that point, which makes him cool.

Well, I'm glad to hear he had a point. It's a pretty harsh way to get a message across though.

The whole concept of "perpetual motion" or "free energy" just doesn't makes sense - the universe wouldn't be here if it were possible. The fundamental problem is that thinking about this leads you to "how did we get here in the first place", and you can either answer "I don't know" or "my religion is right!"

That's what makes this all so interesting in terms of psychology. What we believe is what we act on, and if we don't quite have a match between belief and reality, reality wins. Some people change their belief, and some don't.

Well, what more can I say than Steorn has ruined my life. I have lost my home, job, my wife and kids due to this obsession. It all went south when I sold my car to front the London demo trip. I made the trip, called in sick from London but my boss didn't buy it. He gave me 24hrs to be back at the office or don't come back at all. My wife was furious, but I knew the world was about to change forever so didn't care. When the demo failed I was in a state of shock, I felt violated almost raped and beaten. I got extremely drunk that night and was arrested basically for disorderly conduct (i smashed several car windows near kinetica). I missed my return flight home and used all my funds to get out of jail etc. I had a friend wire me money for a return flight and at this point my wife was unresponsive to phone calls. I returned home 3 days late to find my wife in bed with our neighbor Jim 2 doors down. They didn't even care and started laughing calling me 'Steorn boy', more salt in the wounds was them asking if the world has changed not only that the kids were in the house. I basically had a panic attack stole my wifes car and just drove and drove. I lived in the car for a few weeks no need to go into that detail. I am now on anti-depressants and at my mothers home about 200miles away. I feel destroyed, violated and unable to get over this entire situation. I still check all the forums every day hoping for closure. Life sucks.

The purpose of dark energy is to explain the more rapid expansion of the visible universe than was previously expected. I put "dark matter" and "dark energy" in the same ball park as "eather". The model we have of the universe is wrong, and when some smart genius goes "DOH!", it will become obvious to everyone else too.

Can we get work out of the vacuum? Maybe, but the cost may be a black hole which destroys our neighborhood. But we might be able to tap into the black holes already in the center of the galaxy and have power for a few billion years.

There's still a lot more physics to learn, but conservation of energy isn't going to change.

@BC"Hey, did I miss a memo? Is the Alsetalokin thing defintely a fake?"*-------

The "Alsetalokin" thing isn't definitely anything except "we don't know". "Al" hasn't provided adequate information for replication and, inasmuch as anyone can tell, he hasn't allowed any clear photos of his actual final device from all angles and disassembled. He acts and writes exactly like someone playing a game or hiding things. That *should* tell you somethings loud and clear.

Video of his gadget being assembled from scratch and operated (without edits or cuts) would be interesting. So would wide shots of the area where it's operated. But nobody will know for sure what game he's playing unless and until he allows someone credible to test it. Don't hold your breath for that to happen unless blue is your best color.

That *&^% so-and-so alsetalonkin has really destroyed my faith in Steorn. I mean, who knows what he's really got, if anything, but he's done several things for sure.He's shown us what a real magnet motor might plausibly look like, even if they are impossible--something Steorn never did, all they ever showed us was a broken rip-off of some Japanese inventor's design.He's shown us what can be done with just a little bit of real data, even if the analyzers don't have the actual device in hand--data that Steorn claimed to have but kept secret even to this day.The S.O.B. even engaged in a constructive collaboration with people he seemed to know only online, and avoided all hysteria and talk of free energy and overunity whenever it came up, damn him. All Steorn ever tossed us was the silly SPDC, trying and hoping that one of us would come up with the answers to their prayers. I was 110 percent sure that Steorn had something until Al Setalonkin, or Carmine, or Red Scharlach or whoever he is came along.He's shown how people irrationally seek to cling to their own theories and find confirmation of them, in the most convoluted manner possible, trying to explain something's behavior before they even know what that behavior really is. Steorn did the very same thing, coming up with a theory and then constructing experiments, or claims of experiments, to "prove" the theory. I know my own theory of mercurial diamagnetic hypervortices was strongly supported by alsetalonkin's BS little device. "Sorry about the light!" What a goof.I'd like to lynch the (&(*&(^% my own self, even if what he did hasn't hurt anybody nearly as much as what Steorn has done. Steorn's a big company with lots of lawyers and stuff, investors who don't want to acknowledge their money's gone into polar expeditions and coachwork instead of African water pumps and Nodding Donkey toys. Alsetatoking, or whatever, makes a good scapegoat, so let's find out who he is really and get him fired. After all, the Steorn forum was nice and peaceful before he started his idiotic postings, and we liked it that way.And to top it all off, other people are already claiming sustained runs of their replications! He must be paying them off or something.

There's only one thing I can't figure out. Where the hell did he fit the battery and the motor into that thing? And what kind of motor behaves like that, anyway? Free spinning both ways, no noise, no ratcheting from the magnets, running for at least 7 hours on a couple AA batteries...???

drmike, so the concept of dark matter is purely the product of flawed thinking with respect to the current model of the universe? sounds reasonable enough.

steorn's a joke anyway -- oops, off track. i mean, it seems like solar and battery technologies are the next frontier (before mature nanotech of course).

i know a guy who's a big believer in dark matter as a source for energy. sorry, yes, i have a connection to a man who's drunk on the ether! (he was on the steorn forums in the early days after i pointed them out to him.)

The Bussard fusor is looking very interesting. There are quite a few unkowns, but it is basicly a cusp/mirror confinement system. Bussard had lots of ideas on how to build fusion rocket engines, and I'd like to explore them.

You can either use the fusor for electrical power and that could be used for ion engines, or you could shape the fusor to expel neutral gas. I think that is a touch harder to maintain the fusion with since the balance of power loss from free-free particle interaction will be higher.

But if the Bussard fusor works, I will be building rocket engines in my back yard for sure!

Check out my starting efforts: http://www.eskimo.com/~eresrch/Fusion

My next step is electron fluid - I want to see how it "explodes" with no ions as a code test. It's really fun physics.

Ok, you say you could build nuclear rockets with that kind of money (15 million €, correct?), in other words you could produce kinetic energy by using nuclear power. Converting kinetic energy into electricity is trivial, so you claim you could (maybe?) build a fusion power plant.

European Union is hosting an ITER-project, which objective is to "demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy for peaceful purposes" (as Wikipedia says it). This project costs 10 BILLION €.

Why don't you tell those stupid Europeans, that they're wasting money, and you could demonstrate fusion power with costs that are 1/1000 of theirs?

Pohjan, I suggest you do some more research on Mike. His new IDCDMCC Generator (Invert Dimensional Conductive Dark Matter Conduit Coil) is about to rock the world. 1 coil the size of your forearm produces 1 megawatt of electricity seemingly out of thin air. It has no moving parts and just 'runs' indefinitely. It requires no exotic materials and could be readily manufactured today for around $20 per coil. The big hurdle now is funding. Mike needs $50,000 for an economist advertisement. Then there are the logistics of 'branding' and putting together a website, website forum, SPDC, NDA's and a Jury to validate the coils. The tentative name for the new coil technology will be "COILBO". This could take time, but with any luck validation can be obtained by 2012 and COILBOs will be on the market.

Doing fusion is easy. I built a 'farnsworth fusor' style device (of which bussards is a development) as a university 2nd year lab project. Others have built them in garages and/or for school science fairs. Getting more energy out from the fusion reactions that you put in to initiate the fusion reactions is the tricky bit. ITER is going to demonstrate, almost certainly, that this is possible on a powerplant sized scale using a Tokamak design. It's also going to help develop the technology to extract this energy.

Bussards design might be above-breakeven viable. The jury is still out IMO. With a few million you could definitely get to the proof of concept stage or prove conclusively that it's not going to work. There's a US navy funded team working on it right now. Different thing from ITER but still interesting.

And the US Navy project is being funded at US$1.8M, 1/10th of what I was talking about. ITER is based on thermodynamics, IEC fusors are based on "beam-particle" interactions. The fusion physics is the same, but the plasma physics is a lot different.

And I did say maybe!!

But given what high school kids have done in their basements over the past few years, I suspect I can do as well.

I always thought the easiest and most sensible fusion plant would be a subcritical conventional fission reactor wrapped around a breakeven (or near breakeven) fusion reactor core. A better version of the 'accelerator pumped' fission reactor designs.Politics again a problem though.

I am a little skeptical about Bussards fusion work, if not junk science, a scientific wild goose chase. He had been working for decades with Navy funding, but always seemed to be one step away from a convincing prototype. The last one conveniently destroyed itself during an experiment - very reminiscent of certain other junk scientists.

I'll give Bussard the benefit of the doubt, as he seems to be a respected phsyicist. Although his main claim to fame is in a contribution to science fiction - an invention never realised in reality.

Anyway, how does the Bussard fusor overcome the major flaw in ITER style tokamaks, which is material degradation caused by emitted neutrons? How will energy be extracted?

Nah, a fission reactor is nothing like a bomb. A thermonuclear bomb (or a 'boosted' traditional fission bomb) uses a fission reaction to initiate a fusion reaction rather than vice versa.A fission-fusion hybrid would actually be safer than a traditional fission reactor. Because the fission part would be subcritical a traditional meltdown would be impossible.

I am also slightly sceptical of the Bussard stuff in that we can't consider it demonstrated in any way yet. I would very much like to see a paper properly describing their most recent experiments.There is much talk of aneutronic fusion reactions using Bussards design - with energy carried away by charged particles rather than neuts. This would obviously avoid material damage.

It's my view that the Bussard fusor stuff is plausible and, relatively speaking, cheap to replicate so the experiments should be done. Hold back the excitement for now though!

The fun part is doing the experiments, and there is a group attempting to replicate Bussard's previous work. If they can show it has a chance, they may get more funding. If they prove it can't work, at least gave Bussard's idea a shot and we know for sure.

Using a fusor to generate Plutonium for BWR's makes a lot of sense to me. But it will be a very hard political sell.

Here's a view from a very excited blogger: http://iecfusiontech.blogspot.com/2008_01_01_archive.html

I think the physics is cool. If it works as a fusor that's great - if it doesn't it is still fun physics and I want to build one anyway!!

There's only a few and they're not great! I'll have to try and find the rest and scan them. It was a fun project although the department safety officer nearly had a fit when he saw my setup! Note the 5kV rated cables enclosed in plastic tubing and carrying ~50kV.

you guys are slow. gizmodo has the real deal a new perpetual machine VERIFIED BY M.I.T. RESEARCHERS no less. It's all there, sianara orbo: http://gizmodo.com/353655/perepiteia-perpetual+motion-machine-may-actually-dosomething

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